


\ˌvi-və-ˈsek-shən\

by stiction



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Gen, Gore, Medical Examination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 01:36:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3156050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end there is no question of it. Inquiries must be followed by answers, thus something must be done to provide those answers. And this time it is a rather nasty something. She licks her lips, tasting the waxy black of lipstick. She too has wondered at the feel of a knife at her skin.<br/>-<br/>Meteorfic from 2012, in which Rose offers up her body for science.</p>
            </blockquote>





	\ˌvi-və-ˈsek-shən\

_In the end there is no question of it_. Inquiries must be followed by answers, thus something must be done to provide those answers. And this time it is a rather  _nasty_  something. She licks her lips, tasting the waxy black of lipstick. She too has wondered at the feel of a knife at her skin.

She’s felt it before, of course, but fleetingly, one hard thrust through her abdomen, no finesse in the movement at all, no class, no love, no lingering touch of steel so that she might fully savor it.

“You could use me,” she says then, before the decision to speak fully comes into her mind, and suddenly there are five pairs of eyes on her. One is slightly askew but looking in her general direction, at least, so she decides that counts, however vacant the stare may be. Two pairs are wide with sharp alarm - of course, she can only see one of these pairs, but she knows that behind the tinted shades, the look is identical. One pair waffles between distress and hunger with each passing second. And the fifth, well, the fifth is perhaps the most worrying. She’s not used to being studied with such fascination, certainly not from him.

She doesn’t know where the Mayor is at the moment. That’s likely for the best.

The first eyes are tense, brow furrowing behind red glasses. Probably thinking about how it would smell, rich as cherries and with a pastel undertone. Organs in neither species are vividly colored, supposedly.

“What the fuck do you mean-?” and the two pairs of alarmed eyes turn towards each other like they’re about to start a fight over saying the same thing at the same time. She has the momentary but well-revisited thought that they are cut from twin bolts of cloth, their knights.

A quiet, “Are you certain-?” and a touch on her arm from the fourth, but it isn’t foolproof and she can see the momentary flicker of hunger again, hidden behind the words and the hand on her elbow.

And the fifth pair of eyes just stares at her. Hard and unflinching. Detached. Out of any of them they are the only ones that give her pause. But somehow it all happens. Despite the trepidation and outright protest by some.

None of the decision-making process is very clear and it’s likely that the two largest factors in the process are boredom and curiosity. Curiosity, certainly, from four out of five; though boredom is a common ailment it’s probably only the motivation of a few of five, but not the same that lacks curiosity, in any case.

Their meteor haven was built for trolls, the cabinets stocked for trolls; she ingests several mysterious and bitter-tasting tablets that are apparently some kind of sedative. It makes her float but she can still see and think and she watches, blinking as slowly as her heart beats; she watches and spreads her arms out wide as though embracing death, though she knows death will not come to her. Her hands close around rubber-wrapped steel grips, and Kanaya’s shaking fingers do up the several pre-arranged restraints - not, presumably, for restraint, but for support. Her knees are weak.

At times when she was young and stupid (and though she is still young and stupid she would vehemently deny both charges), but at times when she was young and stupid she would wonder how this could feel. She would trace the lines of her bones under her skin and wonder what they looked like. When she was eleven she fell down the stairs at home and split her shin on the stone cape of a wizard statue and watched as though hypnotized as the doctors at the hospital sewed her skin shut again. They patted her on the head before she left and made sure her mother knew how to take care of the cut. Even her mother called her brave, but she wasn’t really brave, she was quite sick and never forgot the look of her muscles twitching under her skin.

The first cut comes carefully and slips her easily from memory into existence and she so wishes that Kanaya would pay more attention to her hands, her eyes are blown wide and glassy and it makes for unsettling eye contact. She means to incline her head meaningfully, but it drops forward as with a doll with no neck support and though careful measures were taken to prevent exsanguination she can see thick streams of red trailing over her soon-to-be split navel and down the inside of each thigh in a disturbing mimicry of menstruation.

There’s some Freudian meaning in that connection. She can’t quite grasp it.

From the start, though, and that thought summons this in natural succession, from the start the most uncomfortable part of this was her nudity. Children are children. Dave ducked his head and coughed a little and rubbed the back of his neck and she knows he looked up a few times if only to look back down at his stupid gym sweats in the next second in abject mortification. Incorrigible, he is, she’s still got her underwear on and he’s got to learn about the birds and the bees at some point, hasn’t he, and she’s thinking about Dave and sex and Kanaya’s hands looking much less steady on an alchemized scalpel than on an embroidery needle or her chainsaw.

There’s also some Freudian meaning in thinking about Dave and sex in the same heartbeat and about the wholly phallic imagery involved in Kanaya wielding sharp instruments meant to penetrate and the first heavy layer of her being is suddenly pushed aside, a capital I on her chest with wings made of her skin. It draws an involuntary breath out of her and Kanaya takes the breath in though she doesn’t truly need it.

Kanaya said in close and private quarters recently that she would’ve volunteered as a trade-off had her own body been fresh enough. A body thriving off only the sustenance of blood she said has very different functions than the average troll. It was a believable line and the truth regardless but still it reeked of a twisted and perverse logic and she laughed a little, touched a glowing cheek and said that she wasn’t worried.

And she wasn’t, not really, except maybe about the sharp and staring look of Gamzee, who was as hungry as Kanaya, if in a different fashion.

Her breaths are stuttered, stunted, pathetic like those of a dying animal, and she thinks about dying in a manner so abstract as to be utterly intangible. She thinks about death and knows that the moment that will come soon in which she will slip away into the dark. And she might spend a minute there, or an hour, or days upon days, but she will resurface in due time with a breath like coming up from deep water. She will revive.

For martyrdom implies a certain sacrifice, while she is merely a little bored.

And a just death wouldn’t possibly apply to this. She has been nothing but righteous, save a little depravity.

And what, exactly, is the use of immortality if you’re going to waste it on a riskless life?

Kanaya’s hands burn beneath a slippery coating of her blood. She thinks that gloves should’ve been involved somewhere in this, then she supposes that that gods don’t die of infections and that Kanaya has had her hands in more intimate locations, though some people would probably think otherwise.

She remembers then that Dave is present, half-sitting, frozen and hunched on the edge of the tables in front of her. His hand is at his mouth and he is so painfully obviously worried that she would laugh at him - could laugh - does laugh, but only a little, and it comes out as a halting groan and it gives Kanaya the utmost pause. Her look smacks of hunger and indecision. Mostly hunger. Kanaya probably thinks she doesn’t see the quick lift of a hand upwards on the pretense of resting her skin and muscle open just a tad, thinks she doesn’t see a quick dart of green tongue out down the length of a finger, a hard exhale like a stifled grunt of sexual or visceral satisfaction.

She sees it but she doesn’t judge it as Kanaya has fed from her before in the tiniest of increments, a restrained yet feverish lapping at shallow scrapes on her collarbone, the inside of her arm, the vein in her thigh, secret places where nobody can see. Blood is a sparse commodity and should not be wasted. It comes then that everybody’s seen these marks now. Perhaps not Dave or Terezi, by virtue of human eyesight and blindness, nor Gamzee by virtue of apathy, but Karkat is watching intently and with a pained expression on his face and you know he’s probably noticed the patches of shiny, pale scar tissue that mark your body in strategic locations.

They’re like hickeys that don’t quite ever fade and she treasures them, mostly, traces the edges of them when they have healed and also when they still bleed sluggishly and Kanaya lies next to her, eyes half-lidded and her body glowing brighter, her stomach slightly swollen though she has taken hardly a mouthful in total.

She feels mild regret again that Dave is present. His stomach is decidedly weak and he has no reason to be watching his mostly naked genetic sister be flayed as though she were a frog in a tenth-grade biology class.

Poor thing, Dave is. Watching himself die several times over, not-grieving over his brother-father’s corpse, and now her, bleeding openly in the cold lights of a lab room for the sake of science and cultural olive branches.

No, the latter is a lie.

The time for cultural olive branches came a long time ago. They have been on this meteor for two years now and this is just for the sake of easing boredom.

She wonders if this is how patients in surgical theaters in centuries past had felt.

But mostly she feels tired. Her toes have grown sticky with blood and Kanaya raises the back of her hand to her mouth like she’s stifling some reservations but she knows, she can see the hunger and the satiation of it just the same as she saw the hunger and the satiation of it in herself, her godhood wasted on trivial matters, these two years of her life wasted on this meteor.

She is fifteen and knows that fifteen is too young to be dying and living and dying in turns, probably too young to be letting her blood for a vampire with an insatiable appetite, necessary or not, in love or not, but fifteen feels a lot like twenty or thirty when you have died and lived and killed for the right to do all of these things. She figures she’s earned her immortality and her immorality alike.

What her mother doesn’t know won’t hurt her.

Because her mother is dead.

Kanaya’s fingers seem impossibly large and blunt, the sensation dulled by sedatives where it would probably be a thousand points of searing agony. She recalls that none of the trolls believed, upon feeling the elasticity of the human body, that homo sapiens were not an extremely vulnerable and simple coelom-based species. Were it not masked by disgust and helpless fascination she imagines that most of them would feel relief knowing that they were not in the company of such primitive beings.

Her knees jerk together at a sudden hard push of pressure; if her eyes weren’t fluttering she would look to see the cause, Kanaya’s hand in her abdomen up to the wrist. The watery sounds of conversation filter in and subsequently out, barely audible over her breathing as it turns from ragged wheezing to a weak whistle.

And, finally— _for now_ —to nothing.


End file.
